


Recreational Reading

by shifty_cat



Category: Persona 5
Genre: F/M, Makoto Niijima Week, Philosophical Dialogue
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-16
Updated: 2019-09-16
Packaged: 2020-10-19 19:49:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,067
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20662775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shifty_cat/pseuds/shifty_cat
Summary: Makoto's idea of reading for fun is a bit unconventional.





	Recreational Reading

**Author's Note:**

> Content warning: brief discussion of 18th Century judicial torture.

I

“‘There remains, therefore, a trace of ‘torture’ in the modern mechanisms of criminal justice – a trace that has not been entirely overcome, but which is enveloped, increasingly, by the non-corporal nature of the penal system.’”

Makoto set her finger on the page and closed the book, leaning back onto Akira with a groan, clearly displeased with this assertion, and moreso that she did not feel she could adequately refute it. Akira wrapped his arms around her waist and gave her a comforting squeeze. “Discipline & Punish seems like a bit of an odd choice for an aspiring police commissioner.”

She sighed and turned her head to rest her cheek on his chest, closing her eyes and seeking refuge from the horrors she had just read in his closeness and warmth. “Perhaps, but I want to reform the system, to make the police true agents of Justice. If I simply accept as granted that the criminal justice system itself is fundamentally right, I’d be the same as I was before, just going along with whatever authorities told me to do. I want my ideas and my ethics to be challenged.”

He chuckled and leaned down to plant a soft kiss on the top of her head. “Is that why you put up with me?”

She smiled and giggled, nuzzling her cheek into him and wrapping her free arm around him to hold him closer. “Well, there are certainly other benefits, but I do appreciate that you always seem to present novel counterarguments.” She shuddered. “And debating you is considerably more pleasant than reading six pages of detailed description about the barbaric torture and execution of Damiens.”

He nodded with a wince. “That was pretty horrific. It’s scary to think that for centuries a significant part of legal thought was coming up with ways to inflict as much unspeakable agony as possible, while delaying death as long as possible.”

She hummed in agreement. “Mm, and the idea of executions as public spectacle is so bizarrely terrifying. Imagine a crowd assembling to watch a man being slowly flayed and dismembered. How can you see that and not want to stop it? Even if he was a murderer, how can that seem acceptable, let alone Just?”

Akira released one hand from Makoto to reach for his notes. “Foucault posits that was part of what led to the decline of public torture. ‘It was as if the punishment was thought to equal, if not to exceed, in savagery the crime itself… to make the executioner resemble a criminal, judges murderers, to reverse roles at the last moment, to make the tortured criminal an object of pity or admiration.’ The State can’t have the masses seeing criminals as human just as it’s killing them. Better to keep them locked away, out of the public’s sight, where they won’t cause a disturbance.”

Makoto sighed deeply, approaching the subject she was most troubled by. “Surely, though, the general adoption of the prison system marks a societal advance from the days of torturing criminals to death. What the police did to you when you were captured was barbaric, but surely that was an aberration, corrupt officers under Shido’s sway. That isn’t how the system is supposed to work.”

She could feel Akira tense as he considered her unspoken question. “Well, I imagine it’s preferable to having your limbs torn off by horses, but having lived it, the rules for the House of young prisoners in Paris felt frighteningly familiar. The systematic elimination of freedom and choice, the absolute regimentation and subjection to authority. It’s like Foucault says, we’ve gone from inflicting suffering directly on the body to targeting the mind and will.”

She lifted her head from his chest and glanced up at him, pain and indecision in her questioning look. “You really think there’s still a… a desire, or an impulse, to torture in the modern criminal justice system?”

He grimaced, then seeing her tormented look, his expression softened, and he brought up a hand to gently stroke her cheek. “Makoto, I know you don’t want to hear this, but having spent fifty days in solitary confinement, I definitely think the urge to torture is still there. I even sort of understand it. I mean, part of me wants Kamoshida and Kaneshiro to suffer. Even if we reformed them, that doesn’t erase the harm they did.”

She turned away with a pained frown, then returned her eyes to his, full of sympathy and horror at his suffering. “What… what was it like? If… if you’re willing to talk to me about it, I’d like to know what you went through, please.”

His eyes took on a strange cast, a mix of sadness and emptiness, as though he could no longer see her, but his vision was fixed on some distant nothingness. “It was unbearable. Worse than the drugs or the beatings. Twenty three hours a day completely alone, one hour of exercise alone in the yard except for a guard. You don’t realize, until you’re that alone, how much you need other people, even just to see someone, to know there’s a world beyond your own thoughts.”

He refocused on her, with a look of loss and pain that brought her close to tears, and his arms tightened around her waist with a feeling of desperation, as though he had to reassure himself that she was really there. “The worst, though, was not knowing if I would ever see you again. If I would spend the rest of my life locked in a box, and you would eventually forget me, and find someone else, and go on with your life. And as much as that hurt, I thought that would be better than you wasting your life waiting for me as I wasted away in that box.”

Makoto found that she could say nothing. Instead, she brought her hand up to gently hold his hair, and pulled him down into a desperate kiss, one that told him that she was there with him in that moment, and that she would be with him forever, and she would never let him go again. When, after a very long time, she pulled back, she was glad to see the Akira she loved back. He gave her a shaky smile. “Thanks, I needed that.”

She returned his smile and set the book down on the pile on the small table next to their couch. “I think I needed it too. But maybe that’s enough Foucault for one sitting. You said you had something else you wanted to read with me?”

He nodded and reached over, flipping through the stack of books until he found the one he was looking for. He opened it to the beginning and began to read aloud in his Reading Aloud to Makoto Voice. “‘What is a rebel? A man who says no, but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation. He is also a man who says yes, from the moment he makes his first gesture of rebellion. A slave who has taken orders all his life suddenly decides that he cannot obey some new command. What does he mean by saying “no”?’”

II

“Well, I don’t know how I feel about comparing us to the Marquis de Sade.” Makoto brought a finger to her chin in consideration as Akira set the book aside for a break in their reading.

He gave her a devious smirk. “Does that mean I should throw away those scarves?”

She giggled and gave him a light, playful slap on the chest. “It does not mean that at all, and that’s different. I don’t want to hurt you, but it can be rather fun to have you entirely under my control from time to time. Besides, you seem to enjoy it even more than I do.”

He raised his hands in mock surrender. “Guilty as charged, although I think I could say the same about you for the reverse.”

She ran her fingers lightly across his stomach. “Perhaps we should conduct some comparative analyses...” When she reached the waistband of his jeans, she pulled back and gave him a suggestive smirk. “...after our discussion of Camus.”

He groaned as he adjusted himself. “Tease.”

She gave him a satisfied giggle and snuggled up to him. “I think I understand why he would use de Sade as his example of absolute metaphysical rebellion, though. He completely rejected all forms of transcendental authority, whether religious or legal, but it’s dangerously easy to fill that vacuum of moral authority with a self-centered nihilism, to come to the conclusion that the only Truth is Power expressed through domination. Kind of reminds me of the distorted Hearts we changed.”

He nodded with a thoughtful hum. “That’s one of the central ethical questions of Existentialism: if there is no absolute, transcendental source of moral authority, then we each have to determine for ourselves what is Right.”

Makoto thought for a moment, combing her memories. “I believe it was Dostoevsky, in Brothers Karamazov, who wrote ‘If God does not exist, then everything is permitted.’ Of course, you can’t directly derive an author’s philosophy from their characters, but that does seem to express that dilemma.”

Akira began to chuckle. “Lacan claimed it’s the reverse. ‘If God does not exist, then nothing at all is permitted.’ Without justification from an external, absolute moral authority, we’re subject to endless indecision.”

She tapped her fingers on his chest as she considered this dialectic. “I suppose that it’s the tension between those two poles, between absolute freedom and absolute prohibition, between libertine and neurotic, that defines modern Existential anxiety. We have to choose to act without a claim to absolute Truth. Social rules exist, but they’re made by other flawed people in the same dilemma, so the act of rebellion is asserting that the underlying power structures that hold up those rules are themselves unjust, and that you will stand by your own Justice even if society as a whole rejects it.”

Akira had a thoughtful look as he remembered something. “‘Thou who art willing to perform all sacrilegious acts for thine own Justice.’”

Makoto looked wide-eyed at him for a moment. “Johanna said something similar to me. ‘You’ve finally found your own Justice. Please... Never lose sight of it again.’”

He rolled his eyes with a sigh. “Johanna talks like a normal person? Why did I get stuck with the thous and thines?”

Makoto giggled and kissed his cheek. “I suppose Arsene has as much of a flair for the dramatic as you do.” She thought for a moment. “I think there’s value in the social aspect of Justice too though, as a way to avoid falling into a sense of self-justification. We were always concerned with helping people who were suffering first and foremost. And we were all able to work together because of our social bonds and our shared sense of Justice.”

Akira considered this. “You know the saying, ‘hell is other people’?”

Makoto nodded. “Sartre, from No Exit, right? Sometimes misread as a misanthropic statement, but I believe the proper interpretation is that our punishment for our sins is to be judged by others. The characters in his hell are eternally tormented by their mutual disgust with each other.”

He hummed in agreement. “Something like that. It reminds me of the other thing Arsene said to me: ‘Show the strength of thy will to ascertain all on thine own, though thou be chained to hell itself.’ I feel like, even when nearly everyone at Shujin seemed intent on making my life miserable, I was still bound to other people, to try to understand them, to try to help them through their problems. Maybe I’m chained to the hell that is other people. But strangely enough, it’s kind of become paradise.”

She ran her fingers through his hair, looking him in the eyes with a soft, loving smile. “‘The mind is its own place and in itself, can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.’”

He laughed and cupped her cheek. “Now those are the words of a rebel.”

Makoto pushed herself off of him, stood, and stretched. “The original. But I think that’s enough reading for now. Why don’t we conduct some more hands on studies?” As she sauntered over to the bed, she turned back to him with a playful smirk. “Grab the scarves.”


End file.
